An Ella-gant salute

Staging a musical tribute to a songwriter or a composer involves some fairly direct choices. To a singer, not so much. Maryland jazz and pop singer Delores King Williams jumped at the opportunity to take part in the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra’s tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, but the challenges are clear.“Ella Fitzgerald absolutely inspired me; she inspired everyone,” Williams says. “She worked with the best songs, the best musicians and with the best voice of her time. Her approach to a song, to take it in personally and then communicate it with her audience, is still the standard.”Williams is one of two singers headlining different stops in the Smithsonian’s “A Tribute to Ella Fitzgerald” tour, which comes to the Phillips Center on Friday. What prompted the program was the discovery of an assortment of big-band arrangements for the singer among the collection of the Smithsonian Institute’s Museum of American History. The newly discovered arrangements — which date back to the 1940s and 1950s — haven’t been heard by live audiences in more than 40 years.Some of them trace back to Fitzgerald’s early solo career after leaving the Chick Webb orchestra. Some were done specifically for her different “Songbook” albums featuring the music of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and others. Some were from an assortment of collaborative recordings she did with the likes of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and others. Basie did some of the charts. So did Ellington’s “alter ego” Billy Strayhorn. So did Hollywood’s brassy band leader Billy May, and the great alto saxophonist Benny Carter. “Doing something like this, you respond to Ella’s versions of the songs, but you also respond to the songs she responded to, the arrangements themselves,” Williams says. “Her secret was that she heard every one of these, and the individual musicians as well. You listen to her records, and in particular her live recordings, and she hears and then sings a song differently when she’s recording with Joe Pass — a guitarist she did several great albums with — than when she’s recording with (longtime piano accompanist) Paul Smith, or a backing dominated by (her onetime husband) Ray Brown on bass.”Fitzgerald had an incredible range, but Williams says this is more lucky than challenging. “She could sing in a lot of different keys, so there isn’t the issue of having to transpose and risk ruining an arrangement,” she says.The opposite turned out to be the case on one song in the program in which she worked with an orchestra arranger rather than use charts for the song by May or Marty Paich. As a cabaret singer, Williams had performed “Blues in the Night,” one of the highlights among Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s collaborations, and needed to find a place between hers and Fitzgerald’s versions. “The song is almost an opera. Mercer’s words — maybe the greatest lyrics by America’s greatest lyricist — suggest different movements within the song,” Williams says. “I’d done it in B flat. Ella had done it in E flat and D flat, and we settled on D flat for the new key.” Aside from the obvious question of suiting a key to each end of one’s singing range, different keys bring out different nuances in a singer’s voice, in the instruments, and then how the singer responds to the instruments.“I hear it as a goodbye story. The girl left home. Everything her mother told her turned out to be true, and she can’t go home because her momma don told her,” Williams says. “No matter where you take it, I don’t see this girl’s story having a good end, but on the way she is musing.” Long, stretched out syllables suggest a train’s whistle or the pitch its wheels reach once up to speed. Anapest triplets such as “A Man is a two-face, a worrysome thing” or the repeated “my momma don told me” are turning wheels. “I don’t think you can separate the words from the music; the two were so well in sync,” Williams says.In the end, she sees the narrator exiting the train at “St. Joe,” and even walking on the track as she repeats the tag one last time. The song was written in 1942 — eight charted hits combined to sell 20 million copies that year, and the lyricist used the royalties to found Capitol Records. Fitzgerald first recorded it in 1958, creating a concerto-like character piece from its stanzas that she would build on in a 1962 re-recording that would in turn inspire Williams’ soliloquy-like performances before she tackled it as an Ella tribute. If singing the historic arrangements can be compared to a retrospective museum exhibit, look at this modern turn as a curator’s statement, a singer attempting to do what inspires her about the singer she pays tribute to. “If I copy a song, I’m not doing my job. If the song is only pretty, I’m not doing my job. If it just means something to me, I’m not doing me job.”